Toronto-based Taimoor Farouk shares tales from the Pakistani diaspora with Dawn.com. During the past several years, I have often found myself pondering something as basic as a queue. It is fascinating that from the most ruthless armies to harmless ants, all creatures have practiced the art of queuing up.

On August 24, 2006, I remember standing in a well-formed queue at the immigration booth of Toronto's Pearson International Airport. It was midday and the sunlight coming in from one of the glass walls had lit up the faces of those who stood by me, welcoming us to a land that seemed so unassuming in its politeness that it made Pakistanis and all other desis stand patiently in the queue. Indeed, people were lining up without the fear of being whipped by a housemaster’s cane or the sight of a police man’s bulging stomach – something I had gotten accustomed to after studying at a boarding school and growing up in Lahore.

Since then, I have had the pleasure of witnessing desis enthusiastically embracing the queue culture of Canada. Friends who never gave a hoot about queues and were quite often the first to break out of line in Pakistan became courteous enough to open doors at public places for people (especially women) and happily awaited their turn in lines much longer than those I had seen back home in the past.

However, what comes as a shock after this easy adaptation to Canada’s queue culture is the situation back home. The other day, a friend was telling me how his recent visit to Pakistan turned into something that he wasn’t really expecting. The poor fellow had excitedly left Canada after completing a two-year university program. On reaching home, though, he sent me a disheartening email. He wrote that Canada’s make-a-queue-and-apologize-if-you-get-in-anyone's-way culture had gotten him so hooked that he felt out of place in his own country.

Queues that he once swiftly managed to bypass now seemed endless; driving around town, which he once thought of as relaxing, was now an arduous task; even buying a pack of cigarettes from a store just around the corner of his house took much longer because, like a gentleman, he stood in queues which weren’t taken seriously by any of the other customers.

My friend's message reflected the typical neither-here-nor-there situation many desis find themselves in after having lived in North America for a while. The colour of your skin and the fact that you know cricket better than baseball remind you that you don't belong in your adopted country, while little reminders such as attempting to buy a box of cigarettes from your local dukan remind you that you no longer belong in your own country.

That said, I understand his predicament and can only wish that in our justified struggle for roti, kapra, makaan, bijli and pani, we, in Pakistan and India, don't forget our tehzeeb (values). The practice of tehzeeb in our part of the world today might bring more hardship than relief due to our legacy of corrupt bureaucracies and ever deteriorating law and order. But in the long run, we may succeed in preserving who we are as a culture. Utopian thought? Maybe. But how will we know unless we try?

Last year, when I was to leave for Pakistan after my semester had ended, I witnessed a similar display of disobedience at the airport. Upon my arrival at the PIA counter, I noticed that there wasn’t any queue. Desis had broken all lines: some were sitting on the floor, others bypassed me even though I had come before them. It was chaotic. Holding on to my luggage, I managed to not lose my patience until an elderly desi gentleman came up to me and sarcastically remarked: ‘This flight is going to Lahore. If you keep on standing here like a Canadian you might never get back home.’ At that point I realized that I wasn’t in Canada anymore and had reached home even before the flight had taken off.